In some industries, such as the business of manufacturing air distribution equipment for commercial and industrial applications, many if not most of the goods are manufactured specially in custom fashion for each particular order. Such manufacturing on a custom basis is needed, and desirable, because each of the pieces of equipment in such an industry must be made in an inordinately large number of sizes. For example, steel air duct registers may be available in any quarter inch increment of length or width size over a very large size range. The permutations of mathematically available sizes in which such registers might be ordered makes it obvious that either an enormously large inventory must be maintained or individual registers must be manufactured in particular sizes for particular jobs on a custom basis, as needed. It is this practice of the custom manufacture of air handling equipment that has become common in the industry.
One difficulty in administering and maintaining such a custom manufacturing business is the problem of constructing and pricing detailed orders for particular jobs. As in many industries, in the air distribution equipment industry, sales are actually made in the field by independent sales representatives. Such sales representatives are typically not employees of the manufacturer, but are manufacturer's representatives who may represent other complementary companies as well. It can become an extremely complex for such sales representatives to learn the process of specifying, pricing, and ordering items in a custom manufacturing industry in which there may be an overwhelmingly large number of items which can be ordered. Previously this industry has adopted a practice in which manufacturers send to each of their sales representatives a large book which has prices fixed for some period of time, i.e., a sales year, and contains in detail the part number, and size information for each part number, together with the price for each sized part. The use of such books is satisfactory for such an operation, but can lead to difficulties with regard to access to the various part numbers in question and errors introduced by the sales representative needing to gain pricing information for large numbers of parts. Since for each part there are codes for various sizes, styles and options, clerical errors become easy to occur.
Such a system has an additional level of complexity brought about by the fact that the sales representatives receive a discount off of list price, with the discount potentially varying by both the size of the order and the numbers of a particular item which are ordered. This also leads to possibilities of mistake and error in the ordering and pricing process.
The entry of orders electronically into electronic data processing apparatus for pricing and totalling sales of items is generally known in the prior art. The prior art contains examples of systems, for example, in which the number and identity of items to be sold is placed on cards which are electronically read so that total price and order information can be calculated. Such systems are usually local in their operation, however, allowing pricing and ordering information requests only to be implemented by persons in a restricted locale or requiring the actual physical transportation of media for processing to the data processing facility.
It is also generally known in the art that remote terminals can be utilized for financial transactions. There are many examples known in the prior art, such as for example, automatic teller machines, in which remote transactions are conducted by a customer with the data regarding the transmission being transmitted by electronic communication, usually over a leased or dedicated telephone line, to a remote host which receives the information, processes the request, and communicates acceptance and verification of the exchange back to the remote terminal. The majority of such systems are implemented on a basis which requires an essentially full-time communication link between the host and the remote terminals, so that immediate access to the host is always available to the terminal. In a system in which the usage at each individual remote terminal is relatively infrequent, the use of such dedicated telecommunication links suffers from a disadvantage in that the maintenance and carrying costs of such links can be out of proportion to the economic value of the communication service provided.